8x8 Inc

Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call

8/4/2021

speaker
Operator
Good afternoon. My name is Sarah, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the 8x8 Inc. Fiscal First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. I will now turn the call over to Jennifer Graham-Clary for the introduction.
speaker
Sarah
Thank you. Good afternoon. Today's agenda will include a review of our first quarter results with Dave Sipes, Chief Executive Officer, and Samuel Wilson, Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Before we get started, just a reminder that our discussion today includes forward-looking statements about 8x8's future financial performance, as well as its business, product, and growth strategies, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as they may involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to vary materially from forward-looking statements, as described in our risk factors in our report filed with the FCC. Any forward-looking statements made on this call and presentation slides reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or obligation to update them. Certain financial measures that will be discussed on this call, together with year-over-year comparisons in some cases, were not prepared in accordance with the U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. A reconciliation of those non-GAAP measures to the closest comparable GAAP measures is provided with our earnings press release and earnings presentation slides, which are available on 8x8's investor relation website at investors.8x8.com. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Dave Sykes.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our first quarter results exceeded expectations with both service revenue and total revenue growing above the high end of our guidance range at 21% and 22% year-over-year, respectfully. Key drivers of growth were strong demand for our integrated UCAS and CCAS offerings, continued upmarket focus on the enterprise, channel execution, and our CPaaS business. We are driving operational excellence throughout our organization and culture that is committed to a CPT mindset, customer first, product first, team first. We strengthened our cash position and improved operating profitability on a non-GAAP basis. Last quarter, we laid out our vision for the next three to five years and listed four major focus areas for fiscal year 22. One, expanding our platform advantage. Two, winning together with partners. Three, driving operational excellence. Four, expanding the base. I would like to use these as a framework for today's update. First, we're working aggressively to expand our platform advantage, specifically at the intersection of UCAS and CCAS, focusing our R&D investments to enhance the enterprise-grade elements of our contact center, and maximize the intersection and unique use cases between UCAS and CCAS. During the quarter, we launched the following products and updates. Capitalizing on the demand for integrated UCAS, CCAS, and CPAS offerings, we launched XCAS, Experience Communications as a Service, for customer and employee engagement. This solution advances the cloud communications industry by breaking down the silos between UCaaS and CCaaS to optimize the employee and customer experience. We are receiving broad recognition from industry analysts, channel partners, and customers for fulfilling this need as organizations move to the cloud at a rapid clip. Recent competitor announcements validate this vision and highlights our strong leadership position with XCAS. We are very proud to be delivering today what others are only now envisioning for the future. Customers have also embraced XCAS, resulting in now a third of 8x8's ARR and growing over 30% year over year. Let me highlight a few recent examples. Wren Kitchen, A privately owned British designer, manufacturer, and retailer of kitchens with 91 stores nationwide chose 8x8 XCAS to replace their legacy on-premise systems. They will deploy more than 4,000 employees, including 400 contact center agents, and will use analytics and reporting capabilities to gain deeper insights to ensure an optimal customer experience and support rapid business growth. Additionally, one of the oldest and largest privately held construction companies in the U.S., JSJ, selected 8x8 XCAS to gain better operational visibility across eight entities and 200 locations. The integrated CCAS and UCAS solution will support more than 1,600 employees, fully integrated with their Compass and Salesforce software platforms, and use speech analytics and quality management to drive improvements in customer experience and to help upskill their agents. Public and government sector was a bright spot growing globally. In the U.S., we won Cochise, a public community college in Arizona with over 10,000 students. They needed to replace an aging, failing on-premise communication system and selected 8x8 UCAS for its ease of use, flexibility and call handling capabilities to support more than 500 employees. Also in the U.S., we won Central Unified School District, which serves more than 15,000 K-12 students in Fresno, California. They need a more reliable communication solution with a lower total cost of ownership. After a thorough review process and a 30-day proof of concept, they selected 8x8 UCAS, to support more than 1,500 employees across 24 schools. In the UK public sector, we're experiencing strong referenceability and word-of-mouth referral, further solidifying our leadership position. Key wins there include Police, Fire, and Crime Commissioner for Essex, which provides policing, fire, and rescue services for the County of Essex in the east of England. and supports 1.8 million citizens. The Essex County Fire and Rescue Service selected 8xUCAS and 8xVOIDS from Microsoft Teams to improve their communication capabilities across 50 fire stations and more than 1,400 members of staff. Additionally, Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust, an NHS provider of secondary mental health care, selected 8xXCAS for 3,200 seats to improve patient safety and experience. 8x8xCAS will integrate with key ICT platforms, provide cost efficiency improvements year on year, enhance security compliance, and enable a work from anywhere experience for staff. Our CPaaS portfolio of APIs and embeddable applications performed strongly in Q1. The focus strategy to extend leadership in Southeast Asia is already paying dividends. We recently announced that Coca-Cola, Euro Pacific Partners Indonesia, is using the 8x8 CPaaS SMS API to provide more than 460,000 large and small retail outlets with a secure mobile experience for managing orders and deliveries. Varia, one of Thailand's largest insurance companies, is using the 8x8 CPAS Video Interaction API to enhance customer experience by enabling customer-facing video as part of their mobile claims service. And thirdly, We Care ID is the first medical-based crowdfunding platform in Indonesia built specifically to help patients raise funds for their treatment. They selected the 8x8 CPAS SMS API for one-time password verification and donation notifications. Additionally, Gypsy as a Service, or JAZZ, has grown its developer base by 4x quarter over quarter as customers continue to embed a complete and secure meetings experience into web and mobile applications. We now have over 10,000 developers signed up. Furthermore, we recently released support for 500 active video meeting participants across our entire video meetings platform, including Jazz. Industry analysts are rallying around our vision for XCAS. The market is responding, and we continue to receive recognition for our best-in-class integrated UCAS and CCAS solution. Recently, we were named a leader in both the 2021 Aragon Research Globe for Unified Communications and Collaboration as well as a 2021 Aragon Research Globe for Intelligent Contact Centers. Furthermore, we received Frost and Sullivan's Global Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for Integrated Employee and Customer Experience Management Solutions. Our second major focus area is to make 8x8 the easiest to do business with and win together across channel partner relationships by leveraging our differentiated wholesale and agency billing models and a partner-first strategy. Let me begin with our channel-first strategy and upmarket focus, which delivered strong results. We had a record quarter upmarket with over 820 customers with greater than 100,000 in ARR, a 36% increase year over year. Enterprise was our strongest customer segment of 40% year-over-year and now representing 49% of our ARR. Channel growth was over 35% year-over-year as our momentum continued to build. We formed several key partnerships in Q1. We formed a strategic channel partnership with Sandler Partners, America's fastest-growing master agent and distributor of connectivity and cloud services, providing 8x8 XCAS, to their more than 9,000 technology partners. We also enrolled Callstats into the Genesys app foundry for enabling next-generation WebRTC monitoring. And we enrolled in the AWS solution provider's private offers marketplace. During the quarter, we continued our rapid pace of Teams innovation by adding present synchronization to previously announced capabilities such as SMS, MMS, and fax. This led to significant adoption and larger deal sizes for our Microsoft Teams offering, as well as opportunities to sell additional capabilities such as our 8x8 XCAS contact center solution, a Microsoft certified for Teams contact center solution. Some wins include Infinite Electronics, a leading global supplier of electronic components who sought a single vendor platform with high availability. They selected 8x8 XCAS integrated with Microsoft Teams to provide over 500 employees across the U.S., Mexico, and China with resilient and consistent communications and contact center capabilities. Additionally, a global biopharmaceutical company sought a single vendor communication platform with MS Teams integration. They selected 8x8 XCAS with voice for Microsoft Teams to improve employee and customer experience for 1,200 employees and 30 contact center agents. And we recently announced that a leading provider of supply chain services, Archway Marketing Services, selected 8x8 XCAS and 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams to support their technology enhancement initiative after experience issues with their legacy on-premise systems. We quickly deployed the first of their 13 locations in 72 hours, and we will support 750 UCAS and 70 CCAS users. Our third focus area is to drive operational excellence throughout the organization. In this regard, we increased non-GAAP gross margins sequentially from 61.2% to 62.6%. We continue to show financial leverage in our model, growing operating margins and cash from operations. We launched the industry's first and only financially-backed platform-wide five nines, or 99.999%, SLA across an integrated cloud, UCaaS, and CCaaS solution. This sets a new industry benchmark for cloud communications reliability. In reference to org matters, Ken Berryman will be promoted to Chief Sales Officer, effective August 6th, reporting to me, and our Chief Revenue Officer, Steve Seeger, will be leaving the company. Additionally, in the quarter, we hired Colin Carmichael to be the company's first ever CIO. Our fourth focus area is to expand and defend our base. Q1 represented very strong growth with our installed base, which I'm proud to say now exceeds 2 million paid business users. Customers appreciate our ability to mix and match solutions to meet their needs as they move to the cloud. Examples include Buckinghamshire Council, which provides services for around 800,000 citizens in the region. Realize the value of 8x8x gas. Having previously deployed 8x8 UCAS across the organization for 4,500 employees, they have now added 250 CCAS seats to further improve customer experience. Another land and expand win is Calibri Group, which provides learning solutions for millions of licensed professionals. They use 8x8 XCAS to support enhanced customer engagement and the shift to hybrid work for more than 500 employees. including 200 contact center agents. This quarter, Calibri Group extended XCAS, adding speech analytics to capture insight and sentiment on every customer interaction with the ability to review and deliver comprehensive agent evaluations and coaching for voice, chat, SMS, and social interactions. Furthermore, Envent, a high-performance electrical company, continues to add 8x8 XCAS to more locations. They added more XCAS and Microsoft Voice for Teams seats to support employees in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Germany, bringing their total global seat count to nearly 1,600. Additionally, we hired Walt Weisner to be our new Chief Customer Officer. Walt is a seasoned customer care leader in the cloud communications SaaS industry who's responsible for delivering a superior end-to-end experience for 8x8 customers globally. To summarize, the first quarter of fiscal 2022 was a significant step forward in the plan I laid out last quarter. We beat our financial goals and are raising the bar in fiscal year 2022. We are well positioned to further extend our industry leadership with our customer-first, product-first, team-first CPT culture, our integrated platform advantage, and our future growth drivers. Our strategic vision and direction of a unified cloud offering with XCAS is being validated in the marketplace, and we're proud to be delivering today what our competitors are envisioning for the future. Now, I will turn the call over to Sam to cover the finances.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon. We are pleased to have delivered results that exceeded guidance and improved operating leverage. Key drivers were better than expected performance from product categories, XCAS, standalone UCAS, and CCAS, and especially CPAS. Total revenue for the quarter was $148.3 million, an increase of 22% year-over-year and above our $142 to $143.5 million guidance. Usage revenue did not sustain a seasonal slowdown. We had a solid quarter from professional services, and hardware shipments were stronger than expected. Looking at service revenue, we generated $137.8 million, an increase of 21% year-over-year and above our $132.5 to $133.5 million guidance. We did not see the seasonal dip in telecom usage revenue customarily experienced during the early summer, probably due to regions reopening. Additionally, we witnessed our CPaaS business accelerate quarter-on-quarter. Total ARR was $536 million at quarter end, up 24% year-over-year. Our strategic investments in the channel and product innovation over the last several years are delivering solid results. I want to remind investors that we announced last quarter we were exiting the CPaaS wholesale business. In fiscal 2021, CPaaS wholesale services contributed $15 million in service revenue and essentially zero operating margin. Rationalizing these services will be a near-term 300 basis point headwind to service revenue growth rates in fiscal 2022 and is already incorporated into the fiscal 22 guidance I will provide shortly. We believe this is the right decision to concentrate our resources on our core market opportunities. For the quarter, the part of the business we are exiting contributed roughly $1.1 million in service revenue and little margin. We ended at a zero run rate to at quarter's end. First quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 62.6%, as expected, higher sequentially as we finished restructuring our wholesale business, which we discussed on the last earnings call. Non-GAAP service revenue margin increased approximately 170 basis points over the previous quarter to nearly 69%. Non-GAAP other margin came in at minus 19.6% for the quarter, an improvement from the minus 34.7% a year ago, however, sequentially worse than the minus 12.5%. We have started making strategic investments in deployment capacity along with bringing in a new chief customer officer. We expect to further invest in 2Q. In total, gross profit dollars grew 24% year-over-year as we focused on higher margin business. Looking ahead to the second quarter, we currently expect overall gross margins to improve due to programs we have started to reduce COGS as a percentage of total revenue. Turning to first quarter operating expenses, as we talked about on our last call, now that we are profitable on a non-GAAP basis, we have started to reinvest in the business to accelerate revenue growth. These investments have started, and we expect to begin to see the results by the end of FY22, early FY23. Total spending as measured by COGS plus R&D plus sales and marketing plus G&A was up 13% year-over-year, below our 22% total revenue growth. As stated in our last call, we plan to grow total spending below total revenue growth and maintain our profitability on a non-GAAP basis. Non-GAAP operating margins were plus 0.9% for the quarter as we continue to move towards our exit FY22 at approximately 2% gold. Turning to the balance sheet, total cash, restricted cash, and investments ended the quarter at approximately $162 million. Excluding $8.6 million of restricted cash, the balance was $153.2 million, an increase of approximately $363,000 quarter over quarter. Cash from operations was positive $4 million for the quarter. We expect cash from operations to be around break-even for 2Q, probably burn in 3Q before returning to positive in 4Q. One final item under liabilities I'd like to discuss is deferred revenue, which increased to nearly $25 million during the quarter and is up 133% year-over-year. We have moved towards billing contracts in advance of service delivery and expect deferred revenue to grow on the balance sheet. RPO was approximately $530 million for the first quarter, up from $500 million in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, we made a policy change in 4Q to conform to industry norms. Please see the transcript for more details. Turning to the financial outlook, as we enter the second quarter, we continue to focus on making changes discussed in our first quarter strategy update, including exiting poor margin business, instituting sales and marketing changes, and making incremental investments focused on accelerating revenue growth. Taking all of this into account, we have established guidance for 2Q fiscal 22 ending September 30th, 2021 as follows. We anticipate total revenue to be in a range of $147.5 million to $149 million, representing approximately 14% to 15% year-over-year growth. While this is slower quarter-over-quarter growth, please note the first quarter included $1.1 million in wholesale business that we exited by quarter end. We anticipate service revenue to be in a range of $138.5 million to $139.5 million, representing approximately 15% year-over-year growth. We anticipate to be operating margin positive on a non-GAAP basis. Combining our outperformance for the fourth quarter with Outlook, we are raising full-year guidance for full-year fiscal 2022 ending March 31, 2022 as follows. We are raising total revenue outlook from $595 million to $605 million to a new range of $604 to $612 million, representing approximately 13% to 15% year-over-year growth. We are raising our service revenue range from $555 to $565 million to a range of $564 to $572 million, representing approximately 14% to 15% year-over-year growth. We are maintaining our guidance of 4Q non-GAAP operating margin of roughly 2%. Based on feedback from discussions we've had with the investor community, we made several changes this quarter to our IR metrics. I'm hoping this isn't a surprise as we have signaled on previous calls the changes were coming. During the first quarter, we made progress towards our long-term operating model shown on our last quarter. With that, thank you, and let me turn the call over to the operator for questions.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touch-tone phone. If you're using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Matt VanVleet with CTIG. Please go ahead.
speaker
Matt VanVleet
Yeah. Thanks for taking the question, guys, and nice job on the quarter. You talked a lot about a lot of channel recognition and industry analyst recognition, and it sounds like it's coming through on the channel bookings growth that you mentioned. I'm curious if you could give us a little more context in terms of where you're seeing the most success and maybe how Europe and the UK specifically are really driving that. It sounded like a number of large deals came from the UK. So just curious where you're seeing the most success and where there's still room to grow in the channel.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Yeah, this is David, and thanks for the congrats on the quarter. We're seeing strong momentum on our XCAS product, which is the integrated contact center and UC product. And we're seeing it across all customer segments, but especially in enterprise and growth. You mentioned the U.K. We've been very strong internationally in the U.K., as well as U.K. public sector have been strong verticals for us. But we also see in a land and expand perspective ability to add contact center into UCC that is allowing us to get more products into our current customers, which helps improve overall average revenue as well as retention rates improve as you get multiple products into customers. So I think that the strategy is resonating with coming to customers first and And then our job at this point is to go educate our channel as to those advantages and our own sales team and organization. So those are some of the efforts we're doing to reinforce that positive momentum.
speaker
Matt VanVleet
That's helpful. And then, Sam, on the side of, I guess, investments in further growth initiatives here, it seems like they're starting to pay off the ones you made over the last year plus. I'm curious where we're at in terms of duration. Are we pretty much through most of the bigger step function investments now that we've gotten a fair amount of new executives in, or do we still have a few more quarters ahead of us where, I know you mentioned the cash burn, but just what we should think about in terms of overall production and margin leverage from here forward?
speaker
Wren Kitchen
Okay, a couple things there. So first off, I mean, we reiterated we want to exit the year at a 2% operating margin and no more. I mean, this is very much now that we're back to being non-GAAP profitable, being on offense and accelerating our revenue growth as we get into fiscal 23. And so I would say I don't really view the investments as chunky as much as a continuous stream of increasing our marketing spend, increasing our sales capacity, and putting more R&D dollars towards contact center and those types of things on an ongoing basis. And so I would just kind of expect kind of, you know, slow linear growth of operating margin towards that 2% exit number as we continue to reinvest in accelerating revenue.
speaker
Peter Levine
All right, good. Thank you.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
Thank you.
speaker
Operator
Our next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
speaker
Meta Marshall
Great, thanks, and congrats on the quarter. I just wanted to parse kind of the CPAS and wholesale business stats that you gave just for a second just so I can have some clarity. So are you saying that you didn't see as much of a headwind as expected in this quarter because you still had 1.5 million of the headwinds? you still had $1.5 million of the wholesale business. And then second, if you could just give whether there was any headwind on the ARR from just kind of the winding down of that wholesale business or what we should consider a pure number at this point. Thanks.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
Okay, so I will take that. So it's $1.1 million. So as we mentioned on the last earnings call, we were exiting the business, and it took a little bit of time going into this quarter as we were ramping it down in April and May. And so for the quarter, we had $1.1 million of what we consider wholesale business. We exited the quarter to zero run rate. So we fully had exited by quarter's end. Yes, there is a little bit of headwind in ARR. It's immaterial. It's a million bucks, I'd be surprised. I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but it's a very small number, but it is there. So those two things combined. So all I was trying to reiterate there is that two things. One is that we exited most of the business throughout the quarter. We didn't produce much revenue, but we did produce some that's not repeatable.
speaker
Meta Marshall
Okay, and then just, sorry, one last follow-up on that. Just on the stat about the CPAS business growing sequentially, it wouldn't be CPAS including, you didn't grow it more than kind of the removal of the wholesale, the ex-wholesale business grew sequentially, is what you were saying, right?
speaker
Wren Kitchen
Yes, you're 100% correct. I should have been more clear when I said that. Yes, what we're talking about is the core non-wholesale business growth grew sequentially and fairly nicely sequentially. Okay, got it. Thank you. Thank you.
speaker
Operator
Our next question comes from Mike Lattimore with Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
Yeah, great. Thanks. Yeah, excellent quarter there. On the gross service gross margin, obviously improving with the removal of the wholesale business, but is that kind of a sustainable level, this sort of close to 69% level? I'll take that one, yes. And I will probably be fired if I don't go up from here. So it is a topic with Dave all the time that we'd like to get our service cost margin to go higher. It's not necessarily going to go linearly up every quarter, but it's definitely an objective of ours to get it higher over time. Okay. And then You listed a number of good international wins. Any update on what international is, you know, percent of ARR or bookings or something like that? If you have a third question, ask that real quick, and I will pull the number real quick from you. It will be in our 10Q tomorrow, and I just need to get it out real quick. Okay. Got it. I guess just on – you said CPAS was strong. The CPAS that's left – Are you selling primarily to, you know, developers or is this, I think you also wanted to cross all of your contacts in our business too.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Yeah, we're experiencing both. It's predominantly a developer business. You see that in the Coca-Cola business we won in Southeast Asia and the other wins that we had there. But we're also seeing ex-guest customers that they're leveraging our CPaaS and equitable solutions. And one example this quarter that we didn't mention earlier but is Alliance Medical in the U.K., and they added messaging capabilities to an existing XCAS deployment, and they're using that for customer alerts for appointments with doctors. So that's one example. So we do get both.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
All right, and revenue for the quarter, United States $103.7 million and international $44.7 million. There's some rounding in there. Okay. All right. Thanks a lot.
speaker
Operator
Our next question comes from Peter Levine with Evercore. Please go ahead.
speaker
Peter Levine
Great. Thank you, and congrats on the quarter. So, you recently called out ACAS. So, maybe two questions. You know, what investments or gaps and see, Cass, are you feeling or you feel are missing today? And then give us your view or thoughts on the Zoom 5.9 acquisition. Just curious to know what your initial reaction was and your thoughts on how, you know, perhaps changes the competitive landscape.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Yeah. So, you know, on that combination, those are two platforms we compete with today. So fundamentally, the landscape is, It doesn't change the landscape. I do believe it's a validation that other people are coming to the vision that we have of XCAS, which is bringing UC and CC together. And it's really being driven by the customer demand for that solution. I do think you can draw a few conclusions from that. One is, you know, the era of build your own contact center is over. It is a – we've been saying it's a 10-year build, extreme functionality. And it is something that, you know, it's not known, or we haven't talked about it before, but our contact center business is over $100 million revenue run rate and approaching 40% year-over-year growth. And there's a six-time Gartner Magic Quadrant challenger. So it's hard, or you can't go and develop that yourself today. The other is, I think it's less obvious, but the era of partnering is ending. And while this was fine when there weren't other solutions for customers to be partnered between a UC and CC solution, I think customers, they want more. They want more integration. They want more manageability long-term with, you know, integration frameworks that work well. And they want single, you know, vendor reliability across that. So I do think we're entering the era of the owned and integrated solution. UCNCC product, and that's an area where we continue to be farthest along on an integrated solution. Our XCAS message, which we did at industry analysis events since the last call, has been well-received, and it's now 30% of our business, or over a third of our business growing at 30% year-over-year. So that's where we see the industry and where we see it going, and we're just being driven by customer demand.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
All right, and then the first part of your question, which is on contact center gaps. Well, I don't think we really have gaps as much as we continue to push up in scale, so more concurrent agents, more capacity to handle larger and larger contact centers, and then just continued expansion really down the omni-channel side, so more social, more types of chat, more languages. We added a bunch of translation capabilities so that we can handle 116-plus languages and on the platform this quarter, those kinds of things. So it's really about pushing the scale boundary and the feature boundary to enable larger and larger enterprises to move to the cloud.
speaker
Peter Levine
All right. And then maybe one last one for you, Sandy. What are your hiring plans or goals, I think, here in the second half? How is hiring trending? Just curious to know what retention looks like given kind of the nature of kind of how competitive it is in the environment today. Thanks.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Go ahead. Look, we're a very global organization, and our hiring has been strong, and we're having success in many markets. So we're not strictly Silicon Valley-based organization, and we're catering to our employees' needs, too, for mobility and hybrid workforce. So we're a very pro-team, team-first element to our employee base, and I believe we're having strong success in that regard.
speaker
Peter Levine
Thank you.
speaker
Operator
Our next question comes from Will Power with Baird. Please go ahead.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah, I guess first question, I just want to come back to the strong enterprise growth. Looked like, you know, really nice numbers in the quarter, both the customer growth, you know, 100,000 ARR customer growth. both, you know, sequentially and year over year. So just would love to get any further perspective on, you know, the key drivers of that. How much of that's the market, you know, coming to you versus channel improvement? How much is XCAS contributing to that? Just trying to, you know, better understand the key drivers there.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Yeah, but, you know, our future there is really the XCAS. Elements and it's perfect fit for our mid-market enterprise customers so you do see the cross sell elements into that for the enterprise and Alongside that is our channel alignment. We had the addition of Sandler partners in the quarter I do think there's opportunities for more channel partners such as Sandler as well as you know greater enablement of those organizations, which we're doing with our XCAS messaging.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
Yeah, Dan, let me just ask you just kind of along those lines, as you think about go-to-market for XCAS, where are you in that evolution? I mean, as you think about your key channel partners, you know, are 50% of them pushing XCAS? I mean, how many of them really understand the combined solution opportunity?
speaker
Dave Sipes
Yeah, I mean, we're early in that, and even in our own sales organization, we don't have every sales representative pushing XCAS. So we start in our own house, and when I talk about enablement, I talk about it across our entire sales organization, our SEs, our marketing materials, and our partners. We're all part of the same team at the end of the day. And, you know, describing those benefits of having being able to hit every employee in a company that XCAS does, having unified administration controls and security across your whole organization, having a single integration framework, having analytics across, and a single point of accountability and things like the five nines. you know, platform reliability that we do across our XCAS platform. Both CC and UC is something that can't be done elsewhere. So it's getting those messages across and ingrained. And I think we, it's very early. And so that's a huge focus for us from now through the end of the year.
speaker
Operator
Great. Thank you. And good luck with that. Thank you. Our next question comes from George Sutton with Craig Helen. Please go ahead.
speaker
George Sutton
Thank you. I wanted to make sure I'm clear on one thing. So last quarter we talked about and we've talked for years about integrated contact center and UCAS capabilities. Now we're branding at XCAS, and I saw the blogs and things you did a couple months ago on that. I just want to be clear what has changed. As I understand it, you're building up employee functionality relative to CX functionality. But I just want to be clear what's different quarter over quarter in terms of the actual product.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Yeah, so there's a number of things. Like we talked about the 5.9 platform SLA we launched. We talked about the – presence that we added to our Microsoft Teams, which goes across both UC and CCs. And these are examples of that integrated framework. And so every enhancement feature capability we bring comes across both UC and CC. And those are elements where we see improvements. And then we're doing all our contact center investments in scalability and polishing our omnichannel capabilities.
speaker
George Sutton
Gotcha. One other thing on Gypsy and some of the newer capabilities you mentioned. I am a believer that much of the market is becoming video first in their decisioning, and I'm curious how much of a lead engine Gypsy is proving to become for the rest of your services.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Jitsi is a newer, you know, jazz is an element that we launched. We have a lot of developers on it we talked about. So I think it's an interesting element for our business that is both a CPaaS offering as well as a free meetings offering. And it also, those capabilities and that come from the Jitsi org go into our underlying product across all our employee experience elements. So it's, Since it's newer, it's smaller, but it is something that's growing rapidly with the, you saw the forex increase in the developer base as an example.
speaker
Operator
Our next question comes from Ryan Coons with Needham & Company. Please go ahead.
speaker
George Sutton
Hey, thanks for the question.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Let's go back to enterprise strength and customer trends you're seeing there, you know, Microsoft, quoted 80 million daily active users on Teams phone and how you see that impacting the market and then price points there. I hear about some pretty aggressive price points and how you're responding to ships there and how bundling could help kind of prop up the ARPU. Thanks. Yeah, so on the Microsoft Teams integration and we are showing wins there. And I think there's like four elements. that help us differentiate and win in that environment. One is, you know, we're product first, and our innovation cycle continues. We added presence that goes across Microsoft Teams as well as our contact center and employees. And that's in addition to previous things we've announced, such as SMS, MMS, and fax, managing call forwarding rules, account settings, logging in and out of, you know, call queues, and all of these things acceptable from the team's UI. So obviously, product capabilities are robust, and we keep growing those. I think a second pillar is we're powering all employees in an organization company-wide, not just knowledge workers, but also frontline workers, inside sales, contact center agents. And we're doing that globally across 40-plus countries. A third pillar is we remain aligned and certified with Microsoft. For example, we're the first vendor included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for contact center as a service that was certified by Microsoft. And then a fourth pillar is we align in a channel perspective with channel partners that are selling the Microsoft offerings such as Ingram Micro or Pax8 or ScanSource or Virgin Media Business. So those are some of the key pillars that we're leveraging to be successful in that market, and it's taken us into a strong enterprise business.
speaker
Wren Kitchen
All right, and I'll cover the pricing question. I have to admit, we don't really see radically different pricing um you know yes we have occasionally seen a crazy deal across our desk but our ability to mix and match across you know that flexibility across both teams users non-teams users the contact centers The ability to then have one statement of work with professional services across that whole group, et cetera, becomes a pretty compelling value proposition. And then when you add the lower total cost of ownership of not having 40 separate carrier relationships around the world or 20 separate carrier relationships around the world, all those things, the per line pricing just sort of works itself out as being incredibly reasonable for what we offer. So I don't see any particular pricing pressure from teams in particular.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Really helpful. Thanks for the call.
speaker
Operator
Again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star, then 1. Our next question comes from Danielle Bertis with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
speaker
spk02
Hi, this is Tanika on for Dan. Congrats on the great quarter, and thanks for taking my question. So I was trying to understand the drivers for bundling UCAS and CCAS slightly better. Do you guys see the benefits more tied to IT management and simplicity, or are customers more drawn to the integrations between the two? Thanks.
speaker
Dave Sipes
Yeah. So, you know, there's – it goes across both, I would say. And you get company-wide collaboration. by connecting all employees together, both experts in the organization as well as people that are talking to your customers. So that's one. From an IT perspective, it powers every employee in the organization, not just a subset of employees, which you can only do if you're a single UC or CC. It also provides a single integration framework for maintainability into your other enterprise applications. It gives you 360-degree view analytics across the organization, and it also brings a single point of accountability for reliability, quality, global voice networks. So, you know, those are some of them, I would say, but I think it goes across both users' advantages as well as IT administratability advantages.
speaker
spk02
Got it. Thanks.
speaker
Operator
This concludes our question and answer session as well as our conference for today. Thank you for attending today's presentation.
Disclaimer

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